First thing is that I wish the mod would have told me somewhere that you could not mine nickel.

Anyways, so I've been trying to find a way to get nickel and at the same time upgrade my power generation. I need aluminum for the wind mills. In game under the recipes of the steam smelter it says that it will smelt aluminum dust into aluminum ingots but when i tried to smelt them nothing happens.

The smelter will take the dust put it just sits there without being processed but making steel with it works just fine.

The Modern Industrialization mod just shows the recipe to be possible in a Steam Blast Furnace under JEI but you actually need an Electric Blast Furnace.